Cardiac cine MR images consists of multiple (usually 8-10) slices of the heart over time (usually 20-30 phases). Physicians are interested in computing the volume of the left ventricle at each phase to determine the ejection fraction and other important diagnostic measures, including the left ventricular ejection fraction and the right ventricular ejection fraction.
The traditional approach to compute the volume is to contour the area of interest, in this case the blood pool (endocardium) or epicardium of the left ventricle on a series of short axis slices. These contours are then stacked and given a thickness based on the slice thickness and the inter-slice spacing to compute individual volume contributions which are then summed to obtain the final volume. The same computation is applied for the right ventricle.
A major problem with this technique is the imprecision at the mitral valve base plane. This plane is oblique compared to the short axis plane and is very difficult to define well on short axis images.
Accordingly, novel and improved methods and systems to perform cardiac chamber volume computation from cardiac MR Cine images are required.